6 Answers
6

let rec permutations list taken =
seq { if Set.count taken = List.length list then yield [] else
for l in list do
if not (Set.contains l taken) then
for perm in permutations list (Set.add l taken) do
yield l::perm }

The 'list' argument contains all the numbers that you want to permute and 'taken' is a set that contains numbers already used. The function returns empty list when all numbers all taken.
Otherwise, it iterates over all numbers that are still available, gets all possible permutations of the remaining numbers (recursively using 'permutations') and appends the current number to each of them before returning (l::perm).

To run this, you'll give it an empty set, because no numbers are used at the beginning:

Tomas' solution is quite elegant: it's short, purely functional, and lazy. I think it may even be tail-recursive. Also, it produces permutations lexicographically. However, we can improve performance two-fold using an imperative solution internally while still exposing a functional interface externally.

The function permutations takes a generic sequence e as well as a generic comparison function f : ('a -> 'a -> int) and lazily yields immutable permutations lexicographically. The comparison functional allows us to generate permutations of elements which are not necessarily comparable as well as easily specify reverse or custom orderings.

The inner function permute is the imperative implementation of the algorithm described here. The conversion function let comparer f = { new System.Collections.Generic.IComparer<'a> with member self.Compare(x,y) = f x y } allows us to use the System.Array.Sort overload which does in-place sub-range custom sorts using an IComparer.

The permutations function works by constructing an n-ary tree representing all possible permutations of the list of 'things' passed in, then traversing the tree to construct a list of lists. Using 'Seq' dramatically improves performance as it makes everything lazy.

The second parameter of the permutations function allows the caller to define a filter for 'pruning' the tree before generating the paths (see my example below, where I don't want any leading zeros).

Some example usage: Node<'a> is generic, so we can do permutations of 'anything':